Save Article

A Mixed Blessing

In 1824, claims about a Washington widow's miracle cure were celebrated by some, called humbug by others—and sparked a debate among Catholics and Protestants. Nancy Lusignan Schultz explores the incident in "Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle." Fergus M. Bordewich reviews.

By

Fergus M. Bordewich

Updated April 4, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

The nation's capital, in the 1820s, was not a nice place. Unpaved streets were troughs of dust in dry weather and channels of mud in wet. Pigs wandered at will. Noxious fumes rose from the fetid canal that ran where the National Mall does today. Indeed, Washington was less a city than a half-built camp for seasonal politicians, slaves and poor white workers. It was an unlikely setting for a mystical epiphany that startled the young nation, threatened to upset the delicate balance between majority Protestants and minority Catholics, and resonated across the Atlantic to the precincts of the Holy Roman Empire.